What key role can Service Virtualization play as your company works toward DevOps? How can SV help you avoid automation disaster? Those questions and more are answered in this latest roundup of what people around the web are saying about SV. Enjoy!

Service Virtualization is a key to DevOps implementation

Android developer Malik Abualzait wrote on his blog about the role Service Virtualization can have in promoting a DevOps transition. As he correctly notes, and as we’ve written here many times, DevOps starts with breaking down old workflow paradigms.

However, Abualzait gives a half-dozen ways SV can help clear obstacles along the way. Among them: Service Virtualization creates a functional test environment when you lack access to dependent systems, and it saves bundles of money because you don’t have to spend precious time constructing test infrastructures.

That’s not to mention the fact that it leads to better software, which will heighten the effect your team feels — and increase your company’s profitability — along the road to DevOps.

Abualzait concludes:

“The integration of various disciplines in a business to work in tandem is the hallmark of DevOps testing, and leveraging service virtualization to achieve the same is the proverbial icing on the cake with respect to savings on cost and time, and enhancement of an organization’s brand value.”

Swerving around the pitfalls of automation

Over at SDTimes, editor Madison Moore provided a good analysis of the ways companies can avoid wasting time and money while wading into test automation, including a roundup of CA Blazemeter and the other tools that can help along the way.

One good takeway from the piece (read it all here) is that you can’t expect automation tools to solve all your problems. After selecting the right tools, it’s important to address the cultural piece of the Agile puzzle, according to Michael Eckhoff, who works on automation at Tricentis.

“Companies need to get their teams to buy into the concept of test automation, or organizations will continue to treat agile as the ‘Wild West,’ where teams do whatever they want just to release things fast, and then when it breaks, they do it again, said Eckhoff. He said this way of thinking just doesn’t work for the enterprise, and those organizations need more than just a tool to achieve speed and quality applications; they need a process in place that supports agile development and QA early on.”

How Beachbody used Service Virtualization in its digital transformation

Integration Developer News writer Vance McCarthy recently published a detailed case study of the digital transformation and the role Service Virtualization played at Beachbody, a $1 billion fitness and nutritional supplement business.

Beachbody, which was featured at the recent CA World gathering in Las Vegas, employed CA’s end-to-end API portfolio to speed development while raising quality. Michael Lee, Beachbody’s VP for technology, told IDN that APIs, “when done correctly, are the only way to avoid large re-platforming projects.”

Beachbody’s ambitious API project was aimed at linking systems for e-commerce, content management and customer service, among others. Before the project, the systems worked independently, which drove up costs while hindering efficiency.

McCarthy writes:

“As it turned out, Lee found APIs would prove to be a great way to achieve ‘loose-coupling’ — one that could support data, services and component-level integration. In terms of loose-coupling, Lee’s team discovered an API-founded approach would solve quite a few of the limitations and complications of SOA (services-oriented architecture).

‘With SOA, we created a horizontal services team and they became the central source of knowledge for our middleware pieces. The result was an app delivery team would have to depend on that horizontal service to help them,’ Lee said. ‘The worst part of this dependency across teams often meant the app delivery team wouldn’t always understand what that service does,’ he added.”